Nowadays, catching and retaining the attention of your website visitors is not an easy job. You need to be inventive and make it engaging. Therefore, UI/UX designers add interactive websites elements to create a truly unique experience. The challenge here though is to create an interactive website without sacrificing its usability and clear structure.
For this reason, today’s blog post is aimed at providing you with a guide on creating engaging user experiences. Also, we will show you examples of the best interactive websites to inspire you.
Interactive website elements to create engaging experience
For creating an interactive experience that will get visitors addicted to your website, you can use interactive elements. This can be a simple thing at first sight, but eventually, it can turn into your website’s attraction. Just remember one thing: there shouldn’t be too much going on, everything must be in balance.
So, here are the heroes of your website’s user experience:
1. Interactive and animated elements.
It’s a great idea to add dynamic layouts to make your website design interactive. This helps to create a more immersive experience than conventional static backgrounds. It captivates visitor’s attention the same way watching a movie does. Moreover, it helps to strengthen the effect of conveying your brand message. Therefore, use animations or videos when you want to liven up your website’s background.
2. Scrolling interaction
The design has evolved from being just static and scrolling effects are one of the most widespread interactive web design elements. The main goal of the scrolling effects is to encourage users to keep scrolling and spend more time on your website.
Also, scrolling effects can help you to break your website’s content into several sections and create cool transition effects. Or, by introducing interactive scrolling you can guide visitors through your site content while focusing their attention on the most essential information.
3. AR
Augmented reality is the technology that is taking over web design recently to grant users immersive experiences. It is the most popular in e-commerce as AR allows people not only to see the product but actually to try it on, even if it’s only virtually. Also, it is a great marketing asset as it provides a lot of options for engaging content.
4. Interactive infographics
Infographics are good for building trust in your brand and explaining complex things in an engaging way. However, interactive infographics can be even more effective as they offer more than just words and images on a page. They help you to create an engaging experience for your website visitors and make them actually pay attention to your message, especially if it contains numbers.
Also, try to make that interaction more fun for users to make them want to explore more.
5. Hover states
Hover states or hover effects are one of the most widespread CSS animations in web design nowadays. Basically, hover states are initiated when the user pauses the cursor over an interactive element. They can be applied to all interactive components but shouldn’t play a major role in your website’s design to avoid distracting attention from the main content.
Hover states can be used for many purposes. For example, they’re often used on e-commerce websites to demonstrate what an item looks like in different colors or from different angles.
6. Quizes
Quizzes and surveys are another great way to deliver information and help users navigate your products at the same time. Whenever your visitors are lost and don’t know where to start or aren’t sure which product will suit them the most, you can offer to pass a little quiz. This fun and engaging way of decision-making is already widely used in e-commerce.
For example, on the world-famous online retailer’s website called ASOS, you can take a test to determine which size of the particular item of the particular brand to choose.
10 top interactive websites
Okay, so after we defined one of the most popular interactive elements, now it’s time to see them in practice. Here are the 10 best interactive websites to inspire you to create your own.
1. Vredestein Tyres
Vredestein Tyres’ website offers a truly interactive experience. You begin your journey by choosing your language and cookie preferences. Then, it offers you to watch a short video about the brand itself, which of course you can skip. After that, you finally reach the most fun part of the website – Vredestein Experience Centre.
This is an engaging experience that guests can freely explore to find out more about the brand and products it offers. There is a variety of interactive rooms and content to make visitors discover more.
2. BAKE INC.
The website of this Japanese bakery offers an excellent example of an interactive scrolling. As you scroll down the website the essential information about a widerange of confectionery goods will appear through a smooth transition. This interactive scrolling experience also offers a range of captivating visuals on the way to keep visitors engaged into website’s content.
3. ŠKODA ENYAQ iV Experience
The website for presentation of new ŠKODA electric car provides its visitors with the indeed engaging user experience. You have a choice to choose between two worlds to discover Electric and Attitude. Each of the path guides a visitor through a new vehicle’s capabilities – whether it’s the eco part of the Electric world or performance side of the Attitude one.
This is a great example of how you can present the new product with stylish transition and interesting storytelling.
4. Nolook inc.
This website for a corporation that is known for a sportswear and sports mask in Tokyo is another great example of the interactive scrolling combined with the simplicity and minimalistic style. This is a great example of using interactive scrolling not only for presenting the information to the visitors but also showing them your best-selling products.
5. Afends
If we’re talking about great interactive retail websites it’s worth mentioning the Afends, an Australian clothing brand. It is famous for its eco-friendly apparel made of hemp and stylish collections. Their website offers a nice example of using background video for telling the brand’s mission and communicating its main message while also advertising new store arrivals.
6. Poltrona Frau
Poltrona Frau website provides its visitors with stylish interactive experience. It offers them a more engaging browsing of the digital catalogue by discoveringthree real life video stories which feature brand’s products. The stories are completely interactive: visitors can click on the products they spot to find out more. Also, they have an ability to change the mood of the stories to see the product in a different lighting and slightly different setting.
7. Dedcool
Dedcool is a brand that creates unisex, vegan, cruelty-free, nontoxic fragrances which are composed of sustainable and innovative formulation. And theirwebsite conveys their values and philosophy well. Besides being stylish and refreshing, it offers a variety of interactive elements like interactive scrolling and video. Also, its visitors can take a quiz to decide which fragrance is the most suitable for you.
8. COLLAB
COLLAB is a coworking space in Switzerland that provides place for creative work, innovation, and networking events. Its website offers an interactive way to get acquainted with the coworking space, discover its equipment, and easily book a place there. Also, it has fun interactive “contact us” buttons and visitors can change the color scheme of the website.
9. Listen To Girls
It’s ok to talk about serious topics in a fun way and this website proves it can be effective, too. This one is a microsite in the form of a minigame that is targetedat younger audiences. It engages them with visuals and content about climate change, violence against girls, COVID impact etc. It’s a great example of how to communicate with younger visitors about gender inequality and other social-political issues.
10. IKEA – A Tu Lado
And, finally, to end this list on a heart-warming note, we offer you to take a lookat IKEA’s mini website where visitors can create a visually captivating, personalized video and send it to their loved ones. By filling in a form, users can make a unique video clip created by themselves in real time. This is both an engaging experience for users and a great marketing asset for the company.
The importance of engaging user experience
If you want to attract your website visitor’s attention, you cannot underrate the importance of interaction and engaging user experience. According to the Inc., marketers agree that interactive content is effective at 93% while static content’s effectiveness is only 70%.
Marketers agree that interactive content is effective at 93% while static content’s effectiveness is only 70%
— Inc.
Moreover, interactive content works as a comprehensive marketing strategy. It helps to beat short attention spans, drive conversions and collect valuable data on your customers to discover their tastes and opinions.
Through the various types of interactive content like quizzes, graders, assessment tools, product hunts you collect this data directly from the consumers. You are learning more about your customers by engaging them at the same time.
Then, after collecting this data, you can create user profiles and engage your customers in a personalized way. This way you can send out remarketing emails targeted at each customer in your database or provide them with personalized content.
According to the same source, fully engaged customers are four times more likely to like branded messages and seven times more likely to claim offers from a brand while 91% of non-engaged customers are eventually dissatisfied.
To sum up
It’s obvious that users will choose interactive web design over not interactive one. Interactive content helps users to process the information you’re sharing, spend more time on your site, and engage with your brand. It makes them active participants of your website experience and makes them more loyal to your brand.